If Keir Starmer wants to unite the Labour Party in order to win the next General Election, as he claimed during his election campaign to lead the party, he and those around him should stop painting good party members as monsters.
I spent three days last week in Brighton, attending party conference. Some parts were fantastic: the policy announcements on a New Deal for Workers, for instance. Contributions from the floor showed what our party could be at our best.
Some of the debates were cast as “defeats” for the Starmer leadership, some were reported as victories. The media tend to see these things solely through the lens of what it means for Westminster, but this is democracy in action: it should be celebrated.
That should have been the story. Unfortunately, there was another, much more toxic side to the week in Brighton.
I think we should be honest about this: the seeds of this toxicity were sown in the weeks preceding the conference: as has been reported, scores of left-wing members of the party were “auto excluded” for a variety of offences - many on spurious grounds. This included many elected delegates, so when they turned up at the conference, some were turned away, accompanied by police. Hardly a great start to our democratic showcase.
Those injustices and attacks upon the democratic rights of members have stoked tensions for weeks, and anger amongst the ordinary membership has been growing. These are, let’s remember, unpaid volunteers, who put in hours and hours a week in the service of the Labour Party. However, the overwhelming perception is that they are becoming surplus to requirements in their own party.
In this context, the leader’s speech began at noon on Wednesday, the last day of the conference. I was not at all surprised that tensions boiled over, so frustrated are the membership with Starmer’s leadership and the actions of the General Secretary, David Evans, who narrowly survived an endorsement vote at the beginning of the week.
In the press, the focus in the wake of Starmer’s speech has been on the apparent heckling of Keir Starmer when he movingly talked about his mother in hospital. This illustrates the problem. It seems like “Labour sources” close to the leader’s office briefed, during the speech, that Keir was heckled whilst talking about his mother. But that simply isn’t true.
The precise moment when the first heckle was heard was when, soon afterwards, he talked of the nurses who had looked after his mother, and specifically when he said that nurses’ jobs were a ‘calling’.
That was the flashpoint, and there is an important context. Because earlier in the week, Shadow Employment Rights Minister Andy McDonald had resigned, saying that he’d been asked by the leadership to argue against a £15 living wage. That was the source of the anger in the hall, and it was always going to get a reaction.
But it was wrong to say that left wing members heckled while Starmer was talking about his mother. I’ve listened back, and throughout that section, the leader of the party was listened to in complete, respectful silence.
That spin, by those “sources” is not only unfair, but illustrative of a long campaign against the left of the party, aided and abetted, I’m sad to say, by parts of the media. There is a determination to paint socialists in the party as monsters. That’s the root of the toxicity in today’s Labour Party, and it must stop.
Another, less well reported incident during the leader’s speech was captured on video and shared via Twitter. In it, a man is seen to be harassing a woman delegate behind him, seemingly for not giving Starmer a standing ovation during a part of the speech.
It’s awful to watch. We’re adults, with our own minds. We can decide whether we want to stand and applaud or not. This man had no idea whether the woman he is berating is unable to stand or just doesn’t feel moved to applaud. The point is, there’s no place for that kind of behaviour in a party that talks about social justice and respect. As it happens, I discovered later, the man doing the berating is a senior member of the party with a number of regional positions, which only makes it worse.
There’s a bigger picture here: since Keir Starmer was elected in April last year, on a ticket not that far removed from his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, he’s spent a large part of his time marginalising the party’s left wing – those enthused by Corbyn’s agenda. I don’t know whether this is coming from him or from the highly factional people around him, but it is clearly designed to make socialists feel uncomfortable and unwanted in their own party.
To paraphrase the late Labour MP, Ian Mikardo, no bird ever managed to fly with one wing. Maybe because of a sense of entitlement, maybe because of a history of dominance in the party, maybe because of losing that control – albeit briefly - the right-wing of our party steadfastly refuse to acknowledge this law of physics.
Rejecting wholesale everything that the party did between 2015 and 2019 is mindless, frankly. On policy and grassroots mobilisation, especially, we got a lot right, with members and yes, voters. Polling tells us that large elements of both Corbyn manifestos were very popular with the public. Starmer had the opportunity to tweak and build, yet seems to be going down another road altogether, and I fear it’s auto-destruct.
Of course, Corbyn also made mistakes. Anyone involved in politics who claims they are faultless is lying or delusional. Nor do I expect Starmer, someone with clearly very different politics and approach to Jeremy, to carry on as if he was the continuity candidate. That would be fantasy.
I do, however, think that party members have to be at the centre of any party that has the words “democratic socialist” on the back of its membership card, and they must be respected. Any idea that the Labour Party can become simply a brand, with a party in Parliament, without its grassroots members, is reckless. 2021 is not 1997, and to think we can go back is ridiculous.
The new leadership of the party have played a large part in creating an awful atmosphere of division, and it is in their gift to defuse the tension and let us all get on with fighting this government. That process can start today.
If they want to send a signal that this is their intent, that they are serious about creating a united party, using both of its wings, a good place to start would be to restore the whip to the person who led the party just two years ago.
