If UK Labour does not reinvent itself it will deserve to perish
Labour leader Keir Starmer offering another brewery photo-op on the campaign trail in Hartlepool — represented by Labour since the constituency was formed, but now ceded to the Conservatives in last week’s by-election.
In the end, it wasn’t even close. The dam was breached 18 months ago; now the floodgates have opened.
Like bankruptcy, political downfall happens slowly but then very fast. Labour’s leadership will rightly say they have only been in charge for a year— and what an extraordinary year! But their problems are much deeper than they know or care to admit. They have wasted a year papering over deep fissures — another wasted year in the long decline of Labour.
On Thursday, the Conservative Party won the Hartlepool by-election and in doing so they now occupy a seat that has been under Labour’s control since it was first created in the 1970s.
The victory is all the more significant when you take into account how rare it is for a governing party to win a by-election in the UK.
The truth is that Hartlepool wasn’t lost on Thursday, or at the last general election. It wasn’t lost when the town overwhelmingly voted for Brexit, or when austerity rained down on it after 2008.
It wasn’t lost when new Labour set out to humiliate and marginalise old Labour, or when Peter Mandelson was implausibly parachuted into the seat.
It wasn’t lost when the Berlin Wall came down, the miners were defeated, or when Margaret Thatcher crowed: “There is no alternative".
Because the truth is, the forward march of Labour was halted long ago, when the scale and muscularity of the working class began its steady decline.
It was halted and reversed when what we consumed became more important to us than what we produced. Hartlepool was lost when the age of deference gave way to an era of individualism, and power was separated from politics as finance, investment, and jobs became global private decisions, not national public ones.
Eventually, and inevitably, Labour has fallen so far back in the rear-view mirror that people lose sight of it; they forget what it is even for.
Meanwhile, almost out of view, Labour goes through the motions of electing new leaders and rehearsing lines, propped up by a voting system that now means it can never win but never do worse than second — leaving some in a job, but a country defenceless.
It is not that Labour has lost Hartlepool: it has lost itself — slowly, and now very quickly.
Roberto Unger, the Brazilian political and economic theorist, describes institutions as the fossilised power of previous political movements. Labour today is merely the trapped energy of an industrial era that has long gone.
So, Hartlepool and all it symbolises will not be won back by getting a bigger flag or being seen downing more pints of beer because that’s what you’ve been told the working class do. It won’t be won back by purging the remnants of the left and doubling down on the 1997 New Labour handbook, which in the end did much to alienate so many in Hartlepool and all the places that share its heartbeat.
It won’t be won back by claiming the Conservatives are the same-old-same-old, by opposition as courtroom cross-examination, a reshuffle, or even a change of leader.
The decision by Keir Starmer to sack Angela Rayner as party chair and national campaign coordinator over the weekend has already caused a significant backlash.
By Sunday morning, the Starmer loyalist Ian Murray, the shadow Scottish secretary, was claiming Rayner had been offered a “significant promotion”.
“Angela Rayner hasn’t been sacked, as I understand it, Angela Rayner has been offered a significant promotion, to take her from the back office of the Labour party running elections, to the front office where she’s talking to the country,” he told Sophy Ridge on Sky News.
So the bigger question now is, can Labour be refounded? Ask any management consultant and they will tell you starting a new organisation is much more effective than trying to change an old one. But let’s imagine for a second Labour wants to change. What would it do?
To win another election, Labour must first rid itself of its core creed of Labourism: the belief that it and it alone carries the seeds of political hope, and that progress depends solely on its ability to occupy the state and pull the levers of power — change done to people.
In Hartlepool, it imposed a candidate on the town and was still issuing scripts for its callers to read out. This just isn’t the way the world works any more. If Labour trusts no one, then no one will trust it back.
To show it wants to change, Labour should call a refounding process to which all its members are invited. It would reset the party’s purpose and direction.
It could be seeded by a citizens’ assembly of the public to help set the direction of travel. One option to be explored would be a change of name, but only to badge a totally new purpose and practice.
Labour would then be reformed not on the basis of old trades but the new energy and vitality of a networked 21st century.
More immediately, Starmer must meet all the leaders of the other progressive parties to formally declare a progressive alliance to build a good society — and in the process put his full weight behind the shift to proportional representation.
This, allied to a Biden-like economic plan within sustainable limits, would form the bedrock of a new purpose for Labour. If it doesn’t do something like this, the party will die. And it will deserve to.
Keir Starmer carries the name of the first Labour leader and, as things stand, he carries the name of the last meaningful one. Labour has a year. It must change or be replaced.
• Neal Lawson is a director of the centre-left pressure group Compass.
• Additional reporting by Heather Stewart
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