Another victory for Starmer in war on Labour Left

The leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, has taken on a series of battles with the left of his party in recent days, and won. This culminated in a vote of Labour’s National Executive Committee yesterday evening to change the way in which internal elections are conducted.

Members of the NEC voted, by 19 votes to 12, to change the voting system for the elections of constituency representatives to the committee from first-past-the-post to a single transferable vote.

Momentum, the organisation representing the hard left of the party, had in the past been able to sweep the board in these elections by efficiently organising simple majorities in local party meetings, aided by the fact that their zealous activists were more likely to show up.

The new voting system will require left-wing activists to reach out to other factions within local parties, which may prove difficult given their confrontational approach. Factions sympathetic to Starmer, however, will likely find this process of coalition-building much more natural to adopt. We should expect moderate groups such as Open Labour to increase their representation in the governing committee over the coming years.

Corbyn allies also suffered a humiliating defeat this morning in internal Momentum elections, losing control of the group they once founded. Forward Momentum, a faction which advocates cooperation with the mainstream of the party, decisively defeated the hardcore Corbyn-supporting faction, Momentum Renewal, which had been backed by Momentum’s founder, Jon Lansman. The influence of Corbyn’s allies appears to be waning even among their former base of support.

These internal battles won’t exactly capture the public imagination, but they do illustrate just how seriously Starmer and his allies are taking the prospect of government. The new leader is moving swiftly to rid the party’s mainstream of the elements that made Corbyn’s Labour so unpalatable to voters in the 2017 and 2019 elections.

In the last week alone, Starmer has sacked Corbyn ally and former leadership rival Rebecca Long-Bailey from his shadow cabinet, condemned the Black Lives Matter UK organisation’s policy demands, and pushed through internal voting reforms to shift the party’s governing body to the right. Taken together, that would have been an impressive week of left-bashing even for Tony Blair.

Such decisive action appears to have fed the perception of Starmer as a no-nonsense political player, taking on with a laser focus incompetence within government and the problems within his own party simultaneously. In a focus group conducted this week for Times Radio, members of the public described him as “straight to the point”, “quite serious”, “statesmanlike” – attributes no Labour leader has been associated with since the era of New Labour.

But Starmer should beware the risks of a protracted war. Unlike Blair, he does not have outright control of all the branches of the party and cannot win the battle against the left singularly. There will be no Clause 4 moment under his leadership. While he can decisively win small battles such as yesterday’s NEC vote, he could become vulnerable to the perception that the party is split if such battles continue indefinitely. This would in turn reverse perceptions about his leadership qualities.

Corbyn-supporting activists still hold critical positions within the party’s core. Many of the 12 members of the NEC who yesterday voted against voting system reform are still loyal to the politics of their former leader, and are increasingly going public with their concerns about his successor.

Huda Elmi, who is said to have taken on Starmer during a meeting that addressed his comments about Black Lives Matter, tweeted yesterday that the party was “waging war on member democracy”.

These Corbyn-era holdovers still have a mouthpiece in the form of independent hard left media outlets who can reach tens of thousands of members, and bend the mainstream media narrative, at the click of a button. Novara Media, for instance, yesterday published an article from its founder which concluded with the line: “Successful politicians need convictions, especially in moments of crisis. What are Keir Starmer’s?”

Starmer may have won this week’s battles against the hard left, but they have only just begun. As one senior Labour staffer told Reaction: “We’ll have four years of back and forth, it will get more and more intense, the Trots will try to derail him just before the general election, and the Tories will point and say ‘same old Labour’.”